The Auer Ory Photo Foundation in Hermance, Switzerland, presents an exhibition of photographs of architecture by the Frenchman Denis Freppel who, over nearly thirty years, has built an archive focused on old and modern architecture of the city and surrounding areas.
Between classes I could often be found at the American Cultural Center at rue du Dragon in Paris, reading Hemingway and books on architecture, or at the Cinémathèque watching some of the great classics of American cinema of the 1940s–50s, directed by Howard Hawks, Otto Preminger, Raoul Walsh, Anthony Mann, Richard Fleischer, and others, featuring the camera work of James Wong Howe and, above all, John Alton. It may have been Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 silent film Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis that, as a film buff, inspired me to photograph Los Angeles neighborhoods, combining reportage photography and architecture photography.
I’m an autodidact whose education includes the books of Anselm Adams, correspondence courses at the Famous Photographers School, a summer internship at a color photo lab, and a stint as an assistant to a commercial photographer. To date, all my architecture photographs have been in color, but I have always privileged black and white and, whenever possible, deliberately took the same shot twice, in color and black and white. One of my colleagues rightly remarked that architecture photography is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. And so I explored the city without any preconceived idea, photographing light and shadow, emptiness and plenitude, beauty and ugliness, noise and silence.
With a bit of luck and patience, a detail will become an image, since the unexpected in an urban landscape is a good sign. This may be an alley between a row of houses, or garbage bins filled with multicolored rags suggesting a garment workshop, or a lonely church in a big boulevard like a barn topped with a cross, or yet decrepit street lights at the edge of a supermarket parking lot overgrown with weeds… There are no big or petty subjects; a small cottage is as interesting to photograph as a prestigious building designed by a renowned architect. Even as I’m adding up all these details, I have a feeling that it is impossible to complete the Los Angeles puzzle.
Denis Freppel
Denis Freppel was born in 1938 in Suresnes, France. He studied philosophy and propaedeutics at the École Alsacienne in Paris. Starting in 1979, he began photographing Brittany and its shipwrecks. In 1982, he moved to Los Angeles.
Denis Freppel, Los Angeles: Architectures et autres horizons, 1967–2010
January 18 to May 13, 2018
Fondation Auer Ory pour la photographie
10 rue du Couchant
CH-1248 Hermance
Switzerland
